The Sunday Intertitle: Cub Energy

THE CUB continues. Arriving in the back-hills town, Johnny Hines, ace boy reporter, is chased by a hostile dog. I’m reminded of Fredric March arriving in Warsaw, Vermont (36.5 miles to Rutland, 20 miles to Bennington) in NOTHING SACRED and being bitten by a small child. Ben Hecht seems to be playing with the same tropes. It’s easy to imagine he might have known CUB screenwriter Thompson Buchanan, surely another old newspaperman himself…

Comedy and tragedy collide when Johnny finally finds the rival clans. An attempt to produce his credentials nearly gets him shot. His business card is amusing:

My assumption is that he’s added “War Correspondent” himself, a little self-promotion.

Superficially arrogant yet easily dismayed, supremely fatuous, Hines seems to be inventing Bob Hope’s movie persona about thirty years early. He’s also a simpering creep around the fair sex, so they have that in common too. Sidling up to leading lady Martha Hedman (whose sole credit this is), he ogles her at close range through his binocs.

Interesting suspense idea: Johnny hangs his hat on his donkey’s ear and we spend the rest of the scene waiting for the beast to give an auricular flick and cast off the chapeau. The patient creature bears its burden without shirking.

Tourneur then essays an unusual-for-the-period angle change to show Johnny testing the donkey’s patience still further, playing “She loves me, she loves me not” with its tail. I presume a prosethetic donkey tail, perhaps the first of its kind in screen history, is being deployed. Even so, this ass’s tolerance is remarkable. It’s putting up with being a prop, a hat-stand, and a pluckable flower, as well as with Johnny’s performance style.

Now that I realise that Hedman is the romantic interest, that means the bereaved Juliet in the opening star-crossed lovers subplot was Dorothy Farnum, later a considerable screenwriter. Her last credit was Basil Dean’s production of LORNA DOONE in 1934, which is an interesting coincidence since Tourneur had filmed an earlier version…

Held up by heavies, Johnny is asked a meaningless question. I doubt this film is an accurate protrayal of blood feuds, despite opening with an actual Hatfield. But I like this crazy idea — the warring families assume the entire planet must have taken sides. Everyone is defined by their allegiance in this piddling intergenerational squabble. It’s like when I was at school and you were expected to define your status via “What team do you support?” or “What kind of music do you like?” I had zero interest in football or popular music at the time (still hate football) and hadn’t the wit to pretend.

Hines continues to be great with props. Pressganged into this particular group, he’s handed a revolver which he attempts to twirl nonchalantly by the trigger guard, and hurts his finger. (Note: this is a stupid thing to do, especially if you’re unfamiliar with firearms.)

There’s a fun female character who keeps gazing hungrily at Johnny. She’s the cutest gal in the pic, but he’s terrified off her, probably because of her grizzly relations and her unladylike enthusiasm. If, as seems likely, she is Jessie King, then she would become the stepmother of Charles Lederer, another link to Ben Hecht and the newspaper gang.

I also love the mountain kid peering at their own toes through Johnny’s filched spyglasses. This movie is bustling with LIFE!

The Sunday Intertitle: Blood Feud Brothers

Maurice Tourneur’s THE CUB — I was watching that, wasn’t I? Weeks ago, it seems like.

Not all of Tourneur’s experiments work. As leading man/cub reporter Johnny Hines gets the job of writing up the story of the blood feud in the hills, Tourneur intercuts the hero getting ready for his trip with an incipient shoot-out at his destination. As a version of Griffiths’ famed cross-cutting, it doesn’t quite work, because the two actions haven’t a strong enough connection. Hines is clearly not going to arrive in time to prevent one warring family ambushing the other. Without that logical tie, the single suspenseful situation — the ambush — would be better treated as a standalone sequence. Likewise, Hines hurrying to catch his train will be more exciting if it’s not paled into insignificance by continual juxtaposition with a murder.

This seems like the kind of rookie error nobody would make nowadays, and Alexander Mackendrick had an axiom to cover it: “One dramatic problem is likely to be more effective than two,” or words to that effect. But since the whole idea of crosscutting was pretty new, I think the experiment was worth trying. It had literary antecedents — Griffith remarked that Dickens had done it — but I don’t know if anyone in fiction had experimented with quickly alternating scenes dealing with unconnected suspenseful action. If they had, they no doubt abandoned it, as Tourneur would.

Still, he’s not messing about. By the time Hines has arrived at his destination and performed some comic business about engaging a “taxi” — which proves to be some kind of tiny mule or ass — another assassination is being prepared. One fears that both Hatfields and McCoys will have extirpated one another entirely by the time he finds a hotel to unpack in.

NO SHOOTIN ALOUD

The cinematic value of THE CUB thus far has been excellent — but I’m curious as to how it will perform when its hero comes face to face with the issue he’s been sent to investigate. That’s going to require WRITING.

If anyone out there has a tame AI they can ask to develop this plot, I’d be interested in seeing how the results stack up against the 1915 screenwriting chops of Tourneur and Thompson Buchanan.

The Sunday Intertitle: Cub Reporter

Johnny Hines, supporting player of ALIAS JIMMY VALENTINE and A GIRL’S FOLLY turns up in Maurice Tourneur’s THE CUB — immediately!

JH actually lugs the titles into view, as big idiot boards, and then stands very still so a dissolve can fade up each co-star in turn. Sadly, this copy of the film seems to be badly misframed, or else the (unlisted) cinematographer was Ben Turpin.

Then we get Bad Anse Hatfield, of the Hatfield-McCoy blood feud — is it the real dude? That’s the implication, but if so, the IMDb hasn’t caught up with the fact. As with JIMMY VALENTINE’s look at Sing-Sing and its governor, this seems like an attempt to bind the film’s fiction to reality with a moment of documentary. The film even has Bad Anse look both ways, so Tourneur can serve up two scenic point of view shots.

Lots of nice mountain scenery in this one, as in A GIRL’S FOLLY only more so.

As if that weren’t enough — and it wasn’t, even in 1915 — with each intertitle we get two free elephants. Pretty sweet deal.

TO BE CONTINUED?

In other news, I contributed the occasional word and thought to a piece at Bright Lights Film Journal, but it’s basically by Daniel Riccuito and Tom Sutpen. Win $$$! if you can identify any of my sentence fragments.

It’s a good piece, but for some reason the intended image from the Lindisfarne Gospels has been subbed out with a highly inappropriate alternative. This image may be illuminated, but it is not illuminating.